Introduction

Here is my 1/72 scale P-61A Black Widow kit from Dragon.

I wanted to build a Black Widow with semi-transparent nose and in the early
Olive drab/Neutral grey camo. The box contained only the ferry tanks and not the
rotating quad gun, so my options were limited to 'Jap Batty'.

"Jap Batty" was a P-61A-1-NO Black Widow (Block 1: 425485 - 425529)
with the serial number: 425528. According to my references, Block 1 planes
didn't have underwing pylons - a big mistake that I saw on other 'Jap Batty'
model kits. Under wing pylons were only added from Block 11.

Construction

I started to build this kit on 29th September, 2002 and finished it in this
on 24th October, 2003. Rougly that's 11 months of work with with approximately
200 hours of work. OK, I know I'm slow like snail.... :-)

I didn't use any resin detail sets but I managed to buy the Eduard PE set for
the Widow. On the other hand, I spent a lot of time on scratch building. The
number of home made items are summarized in the following table:

External surfaces

113 + ignition wires + rivet detail

Main gear bays

2 x 7

Nose gear bay

24

Cockpit area

64

Radar operator's compartment

31

Radar device

21

Originally the clear parts were badly scratched especially close to the
connecting surfaces. I carefully had to sand out the scratches and finally the
clear parts were dipped into Future.

There were serious fit problems at the wing-to-booms joints - where the wings
met the fuselage, otherwise construction was quite straightforward.

Rivet lines were added according to the line drawings of Osprey Combat Aircraft
book.

After reading Paul Boyer's article: 'Motorizing a Mediterranean Spitfire' on the
FineScale Modeler website, I decided to add electrical motors to my kit as well.
The power supply wires are coming out from the bottom of the main wheels and
will be completely invisible, once the base is finished for the kit. (the wires
are temporarily tacked into the gear bays).

Painting and
Markings

I used Olive Drab and Neutral Grey paints from the Gunze acrylics range.

Weathering was achieved via a combination of Burnt Umbrer and Black artist's
oils, pastel powder and silver pencil for paint chips. Exhaust stains were
sprayed on with well diluted Gunze acrylic grey in many fine layers.

The basic markings are from the #72099 Superscale decal sheet. National
insignias and most of the stencies came from a P-38 decal sheet from Superscale.

The original Dragon decal sheet is too thick. I removed the original carrier
film from the decals, and airbrushed a new one, so I could use some of the
original stenciles as well.

Photos

Most of the photos were taken indoors, with a 3.1M pixel Kodak digital
camera. Unfortunately, I had to use flash on the camera, hence a lot of
interesting detail was lost on the photos.

For those, who are interested in the construction of this kit, 95 in-progress
photos are available on my home page.